


epigraphs of sand

by orphan_account



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-29
Updated: 2013-09-29
Packaged: 2017-12-27 22:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/984613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Irina is the last to hear about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	epigraphs of sand

**Author's Note:**

> for macey.

Irina doesn’t hear, really, until Mr. N turns on a live feed of another Academy memorial service, sometime in the spring. (And she only  _thinks_  that it’s spring, because there are no windows where they are keeping her; there are paintings made to look like windows, with perfectly rendered oceans and meadows and sunny roads, but the air in there is stale and she has forgotten what a breeze feels like.)

Mr. N is very easy, you know. He feeds her scrambled eggs and steaks and all she has to do to keep getting them is pretend to cry every now and then. She tells him about her mother and the men from the village, but she does not tell him about Snowflake. The only person she has ever told about Snowflake is now nothing more than a yearbook photo projected onto the “Gone But Not Forgotten” screen behind Ms. Dagney’s somber face.

She’s not entirely sure what happens, in the moments after her eyes fully register the distinct cheekbones, the cautious brown eyes, the stoic expression. Suddenly, she’s standing with her feet apart in the wreckage of the TV room with blood all the way up her arms and splattered on her face, mingling with her snot and her tears. Mr. N doesn’t have a face anymore. Good. She had never liked it very much anyway.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Tell me about all animals you have had,” an eleven-year-old Irina orders, matter-of-fact, as she prods the finishing touches onto the bonfire she has been tending to since the sun had gone down.

The strange boy whose name she still has trouble pronouncing gives a bit of a start. He’s facing the flames with his hands clasped in his lap. Every time anyone talks to him, he always shies away like a deer that has just heard a loud noise, blinking with wide brown eyes at the smallest sound.

“I…” He struggles. “I have had cato.”

“Cat,” she corrects him, though her accent isn’t any less thick than his. “You are wanting to say cat. Tell me about your cat.”

Abraham had told her that she could build a fire and invite the other children to come and enjoy it with her, but the boy with her now is the only one who had accepted. She thinks the others are afraid of her. Good.

“My—” He sounds pained, though whether it’s from rehashing old memories or from being forced to speak English, she isn’t sure. “I… hurt people, at my home.  _Acidente_. Gato was – the only creature who never run from me.”

He says “creature” in a funny sort of way – like it has three syllables – but the rest of what he says does not sound very garbled to Irina. She nods sagely and goes to sit down beside him, wiggling down into the sand until she’s comfortable, and the gaze at the flames together.

“Have you, the animals?” he ventures after a while.

Irina hums her affirmation. “ _Snowflake._ He was my best friend. My dog. He protected me.”

It does not snow in the desert. Irina doesn’t think Snowflake would like it very much. She hopes it snows at the place where Abraham will send them.

The boy lifts his hand and hesitantly, tentatively, as though he is made of stone and she of blown glass, sets it down on top of hers in the sand. Her fingers curl, but she does not draw away.

“Tell me your name again,” she commands softly.

“Fortunato,” he murmurs. He always does exactly what she says, as though there is no one else in the world worth listening to.

“For—Fortu—” She scoffs, abandoning the endeavor. “It is a nice name.”

“And yours?” he asks.

Irina doesn’t like to say her name out loud if she can help it, so she uses her other hand to write it in the sand. Fortunato studies it carefully, tilting his head.

“Ee-ree-na,” he reads a little clumsily.

Irina giggles before she can stop herself.

“Very good,” she tells him.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Fuck! Fuck you all and your samsara and your lies! I spit on you! I spit on  _all_  of you! There is no samsara, no cycle, no afterlife!”

Irina flails and screams and spits and claws as she slashes apart the guards at the cells where they are holding her brothers and sisters, and their blood soaks her skin and gets in her mouth and her limbs burn with the overkill, but she cannot stop tearing at them with her bits of broken glass even though the shards are tearing open her palms.

“You are liars! There is nothing, and you are liars!”

“Irina—” She can hear Vanessa sobbing from far down the hall. The door to Ian’s cell is now splattered with the blood and broken bones of the man who Irina had known was dead for quite a while before she finally left him alone.

Irina falls to her knees and screams, in her native tongue, “ _THERE IS NO GOD_!”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“How did it happen?” she finally asks, when the winter has come again. Her voice is hoarse and it hurts to speak, because even now, even months later, she still has trouble refraining from shrieking.

Ian’s hands halt at the base of the snow shelter he’s been working at building since the dawn. His fingers are wrapped in tattered strips of wool, but they’re still starting to look blue.

“Dunno,” he mutters, dull and monotonous. Irina hears him crying at night, sometimes, for Akiko. Like a mewling little baby. “Heard he wouldn’t stop asking questions about where you were. They wanted to make an example. Fucking idiot just couldn’t let it go.”

“If you are glad that he has been taken from us, you pitiful little—” She swallows down the last of the insult. “I’ll gut you.”

“I’m not,” Ian tells her, quietly. His nose is red and runny. Irina knows he means it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“I saw you holding hands with Fortunato yesterday,” Vanessa crows triumphantly, the desert sun beating down on her heat-weathered skin even through the thick fabric of the tent.

Irina finishes tying off her ponytail and picks up her sparring stick from the floor. She and Vanessa have been paired off for training today.

“He was teaching me prayer,” she evades, and it’s mostly true. “In exchange, I will be teaching him how to swim.”

Vanessa bites her lip and muffles a laugh. “He’s gonna be totally hanging off of you, Irina. Just you wait.”

“Continue talking about this, and I will be the one hanging  _you_ ,” Irina retorts, but her smirk betrays her. “Personally.”

Her friend Vanessa throws back her head and chortles. She snorts when she does it, and Irina wishes she herself could learn how.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“ _You will always astonish me_ ,” Fortunato whispers under his breath, in Portuguese, while Irina holds him up in the pool, her pale legs kicking in time with his.

“Hm?” Irina replies, distracted.

Fortunato shakes his head. “Nothing, my sister. It was a prayer.” 


End file.
